Saturday, July 11, 2009

Nowadays there are many free web hosts of different styles for image storage. For now I needed the one which accepts ICO files for favicon, but also had checked out some other popular sites I'd like to make a note for the future.

Picasa from Google - provides 1 GB of free storage (have to upgrade and pay to remove the limitation). One good news is that if you are using Blogger you are already using Picasa. All the blog pictures you upload are stored in Picasa and you can see and control them after signing in Webpicasa with Google account login and password. Another good news - it is not necessary to install Picasa on a home computer (at present I don't want anything else but a web-browser). Still there are some complications like, for example, URL assigned for a picture in Blogger is different from Picasa direct link for the same picture - but none of those I find problematic besides that Picasa does not accept ICOs. Some more about Picasa storage for Blogger images is here.

Photobucket is a very popular site; main disadvantages for me are that it does not accept ICO files and user name appears in direct link to a file (I have a feeling that is not very necessary information to be exposed in reference to a picture).

1PixelHosthas a very simple interface, accepts ICO files among others (JPEG, JPG, GIF, PNG, ICO, BMP). It renames file name to a random mix of letters and numbers. Registration is required for uploading files as large as 15MB and unlimited bandwidth. This site was my choice for ICO file storage, so far it works quite well. It's a pity the site disappeared and it does not look as a temporary problem. Nevertheless I'll keep an eye on the site for a while.

Google Sites can be used for files storage as it described in the post "Free Web Storage for Files". To get direct link to a file just copy the address from Properties of the Download link from the Google site page, then paste it into a web browser address field and press Enter - it will show the file and its address will change, this changed address I use as a direct link to the file. Due to the problem with the site of my previous choice I moved the favicon.ico to Google Sites.

I'm pretty new to this kind of issues and it's just the first impression of the free image storage I found available on the Web, so something definitely could be missed - I'll be updating the post while I'll be facing and solving other similar problems.